A reclusive billionaire, anti-tax crusader and major financial backer of Donald Trump has been named as the anonymous private donor who gave $130m to the government to help pay US troops during the federal shutdown that is now in its fourth week, according to the New York Times.
The donation, which equates to about $100 per service member, appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending funds in advance or in excess of congressional appropriations – and from accepting voluntary services “except in the case of emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property”.
Potential penalties for violations include both administrative and criminal sanctions such as suspension or removal from duty, fines and imprisonment.
The US debt just hit $38,000,000,000,000. The 0.001% of the US has stolen $76,000,000,000,000 from the working class over the last 45 years.
We could easily pay off all but 5-8 trillion dollars of our debt, which would all be held by US bond holders so that the rest of the countries can trade with each other, and give every single US citizen a $250,000-$500,000 trust fund that would pay them UBI if we reclaimed the dragon hordes held by 400 people.
Edit: currently, paying off our national debt in full would create a worse depression than the one that Jackson created by paying off the US national debt while he was president. Just to clarify, that particular depression was actually worse than The Great Depression, as it affected almost 60% of the monetary value and supply, while TGD only affected about 30% of the monetary value and about 40% of the monetary supply. Basically Jackson caused the worst, by percentages not monetary value, deepest and longest depression in US history. If we were to pay off all of our debt currently, Jackson and The Great Depression would be footnotes in the history of economic crashes.
TRUTH!
In 2020, The Rand Corp issued a report on income inequality, and the situation is far worse than most people think.
In 1974, they re-wrote the tax code, baking Trickle Down Economics into the system.
Since then, the median salary of $43K in 1975 has increased to only $50K today, while they would have been making $92K if the tax code hadn’t been steadily re-written to enrich the wealthy at the cost of the middle class and poor.
In that same time period, the mean income for the top 1% went from $289K to $1.384 million, while they would have been making $630K under the old tax codes.
That’s a 17.4% increase in the lower median, and an increase of 321.6% in the 1% median. Clearly there has been an upwards distribution of wealth at the expense of the middle class since the tax codes started to be re-written in 1974 to favor the top economic tier. Imagine how different your life would be if the average income was $92K, instead of almost half that?
This study was released in 2020, before the Covid Pandemic. It has only gotten worse, and is accelerating under MAGA. A few are getting richer than ever, while everybody else declines.
Read more about it :
New York Magazine:
Study: Inequality Robs $2.5 Trillion From U.S. Workers Each Year
Fast Money:
‘We were shocked’: RAND study uncovers massive income shift to the top 1%
Reading these articles radicalized me.
There is no actual real reason to ever pay back that debt, at least as long as the USD remains the world’s reserve currency.
Which, of course, may not be the case in upcoming years.
That’s interesting and all, but there’s quite a bit of middle ground between “make the billionaire pay tax” and “entirely pay off the national debt”.
There’s also that tricky part where by nationalizing all that private industry outside investment tanks and the economy crashes.
Can you explain to me like I’m a five year old how paying off debt ruins the economy? I’ve heard it before but was never able to wrap my head around it
Let’s say China wants to buy some Russian tanks. What do they pay Russia? Russia wants Rubels which were illegal to take out of Russia for several hundred years, and China has Yuan which Russia doesn’t want.
However China has US debt bonds which are equivalent to US dollars. So China hands Russia some US bonds and Russia gives China their tanks.
Now expand that to include every single developed country and you can start to see the issue.
The other issue back in Andrew Jackson’s day was that the US dollar was such a new currency that no one wanted dollars so we couldn’t trade with anyone else, kneecapping our own economy that was based on trade.
Ah so other people are trading our debt around. But if we paid that off couldn’t they just trade with the USD that they received?
I suppose that would work in modern times, they didn’t want dollars historically, so that would remove those dollars from circulation in the past, and possibly again somewhat soon.
As far as I understand, all the money/asset value that goes into funding an organization is owed back to the investors, whether it’s as services bck to taxpayers, or dividends back to stock investors. Any start to an organization involves people/ other organizations seeding it with money
Taking on a loan gives you both money (pretty liquid assets) and debt (liabilities). If you just use that money to pay back the debt, you’re back to no liquidity - no leverage to do the things that cost money to get kickstarted or keep maintaining.
So the idea is that, if an organization uses too much in funds/all the assets to pay back the debt, they may not have enough left over to maintain/grow operations.
Source: I’m taking accounting, am struggling, and hate how evrything seems absolutely bonkers at first. But also, it all makes sense. Because real accounting accounts for goddamn evrything.
Just FYI, accounting for a business or household is a whole different beast than high finance of a nation. You or I going into debt is potentially a bad thing. It’s almost never a bad thing for a country.
Debt is less risky to a country than a person in the sense of “if you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem”. Smaller countries with less attractive debt definitely have problems associated with excessive national debt. US debt is especially resilient because the next-most-attractive national debt is much less attractive, so it can fall a long ways before switching investments makes sense. But it can’t fall forever - there is competition - and the complexities of the market mean we can’t predict exactly what actions would be the final straw to trigger that shift, so even flirting in that direction is hugely risky.
Even short of the US falling out of most-attractive-debt status, there are bad things that happen as it becomes seen as more risky, tied to the way that risk perception drives up interest rates on Treasury bonds. Higher long-term interest rates make the national debt go up faster, accelerating the risk of full-on loss of most attractive status. They also benchmark all other interest rates in the economy, making all kinds of business investments less viable and thus stifling the innovation needed to keep the economy delivering for its people.
Paying off the US debt would mean paying back existing bondholders without issuing new bonds. After all existing bonds have been paid back, there would not be any US bonds in circulation, and the US bond market would be no more.
US bonds are the backbone of the global financial system. If they were to disappear overnight, it would be a financial apocalypse. On a larger timeframe, I suppose the global financial system could readjust, but I can only speculate as to how it would do so and what consequences would follow.
In any case, paying off its debt would be detrimental to the US, because global demand for its bonds results in higher bond prices and thus lower bond yields. In other words, the US pays less interest than it otherwise would because its bonds are so sought after. By paying off its debt, the US would not pay any interest whatsoever, but it would lose a great deal of power abroad.
America shouldnt control the worlds economy. No single country should. America should lose most of its power abroad, so we can start to figure out what this country actually is when we arent stealing from everyone else.
I agree; we need a democratic economy and the US-led system is not it. Note that I didn’t state that the US should wield the financial power associated with the status of its bonds; I merely stated it currently does enjoy that power and that giving it up by paying off its debt would be detrimental to the US itself.
Because rich people don’t actually buy anything- they just get a loan, using their potential income as the collateral. You and I aren’t rich enough for that, and paying down debt prevents that sort of thing from happening as well.
Personal or business accounting isn’t the same as nation accounting. Especially a nation with a sovereign currency such as the US.
That’s the thing that shallow political thinkers, like MAGAs ( and many others) don’t understand. The government’s economy is not like a household economy. The idea that we should run the government like we run our households or we run a company is ludicrous.
First of all, recall the largest corporation you can think of. Then think of five more companies that size. Now think of the size of ALL the companies in America. Well, the government is literally larger than ALL of them COMBINED. It doesn’t operate like a company, it operates like the entity that CONTROLS and REGULATES companies, and companies HATE that.
Running a business and running the government require two different skills sets, since one of them is profit based and the other isn’t. Businessmen get successful, and they now think that they should apply their proven principles of success to the government, and save us, but they always fail, because the government is not a business. It has different objectives and responsibilities other than profit and balanced accounts, and businesspeople have a hard time convincing themselves of that.
That’s why, in my book, any billionaire is automatically disqualified for office. They generally do not understand the job at a fundamental level. When a businessman says that he’s going to clean up the national debt and make our country “solvent” again, I know he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about about.
That isn’t relevant to the question being asked. The question is why paying off the national debt is bad and the answer is that the world economy us heavily invested in US Bonds.